The most lovely and talented Jan Heiss did an interview with Misha Dmitriev, the creator of JFluid, which is a Sun Labs phenomena -- a profiling tool that relies on hotswapping for bytecode instrumentation to collect information on the fly.
"Code hotswapping is probably the most powerful way to address the performance
problems of profiling, while still collecting useful data." (source: Dmitriev)

He also claims that it is "proven" that profiling gets you better software. He says that the the traditional edit-compile-debug cycle should be replaced with edit-compile-debug-test-profile cycle. He has a lot to say about how hotswapping can reduce the performance problems of hotswapping.
Guess what?!
JFluid is now part of NetBeans.
(and we know I've got a special place in my heart for the NetBeans team.)
:-)
mary